Early Ripple Investor: I “Never Really Saw” the Use Case for XRP as Currency

While XRP is a topic of conversely for many in the space, the asset is undoubtedly a powerhouse in the industry, with the third-largest market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies. XRP also has an active fanbase on social media platforms.Yet the cryptocurrency, critics suggest, doesn’t have a use case. Former Wall Street trader Tone Vays said in an interview with BlockTV that the “Ripple token itself has absolutely no place,” adding that everything about the altcoin “is bad.”Kevin Rose, a venture capitalist who led Google Ventures’ 2013 investment in Ripple, recently weighed in on this debate in an interview with TechCrunch, contracting the project’s cynics.“I understood that it was going to be used as a way to handle settlement in some capacity,” Rose said when asked about his thoughts on the original use case of XRP. Though he did add that he “never really saw the use case for Ripple as a currency.”XRP Is Seeing Some Use as a Medium of ExchangeAlthough Rose doesn’t see XRP as a form of currency, Xpring, Ripple’s developer platform, indicates that the asset is seeing some use as a medium of exchange.Per a report by Xpring’s Shae Wang, XRP is finding use as a medium for transferring value between cryptocurrency exchanges.This is similar to how Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether’s USDT are used as a bridge between platforms because of their widespread adoption and liquidity.“As market activities increased, network congestion on Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) reached unprecedented levels—transaction fees for both assets exceeded 5x the norm. […] We saw evidence that many users, especially Ethereum users, may be shifting to the digital asset XRP for exchange balance transfers,” Wang wrote.Her analysis indicated that whenever Ethereum transaction fees spiked, there has been an increase in the number of XRP transactions sent between exchange accounts. Simultaneously, the trading volume of the XRP/ETH pair has increased, corroborating this theory.Chart from Xpring’s “How XRP Enables Faster, Low-Cost Cross Exchange Transfers” by Shae Wang, a data analyst at the firm.Many Crypto Projects Are “Garbage”In the same interview in which he mentioned XRP, Rose also weighed in on crypto’s macro outlook.He said that while he thinks there is “no doubt that the future of currency is digital,” many crypto projects are falling short of the vision, and are actually “garbage” at the end of the day:“So there will be something that comes into existence that is spendable and easy to understand and is based on some type of blockchain technology. […] The problem is that 99% of the projects out there and a lot of the people who are behind them are just in this for the pure financial gain. And there’s a lot of garbage out there. And that’s unfortunate because it really drags down the high-quality projects, and it muddies the space quite a bit.”Photo by Ramón Salinero on Unsplash

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